Engineers at Skunk Works to Remove the Union Label

In another instance of organized labor’s dwindling hold on the loyalty of private-sector workers, engineers at the Skunk Works, where Lockheed has pushed the frontiers of military aviation design since World War II, have voted to scuttle their union.

The engineers voted 444-407 Thursday to decertify the Engineers and Scientists Guild as their bargaining agent with the Lockheed-Martin Corp., with decertification proponents saying that unions are not for professionals.

If the vote is upheld by the National Labor Relations Board, the guild, which has represented Southern California Lockheed engineers since it was formed in 1945, will no longer negotiate contracts for 1,120 Skunk Works engineers or file grievances on their behalf.

Decertification also would nullify a three-year contract ratified Dec. 11 by the engineers. The guild would then represent only 15 employees classified as “nonprofessionals.”

The deadline for filing challenges is Thursday, said Sidney Rosen, an assistant to the NLRB regional director in Los Angeles. A challenge could delay a final decision several months if it requires a full-scale hearing.

The decertification vote came at a time when the guild was trying to rebuild its membership, which had dwindled in recent years to only 243, less than a quarter of the roughly 1,100 engineers at the Skunk Works. Engineers have never been required to join, and the union had to rely on volunteer members to stay afloat.

The guild’s membership slide mirrors the widespread decline of union participation in American industry.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, overall union membership has fallen from 33% of the labor force in 1955 to 14.1% in 1997, the latest year for which figures are available. Private-sector membership is even lower, at 9.8% for nonagricultural jobs. In durable-goods manufacturing, the category that includes aerospace, membership was at 16.3% in 1997, down from 17.2% the year before.

The Skunk Works was founded in 1943 as a top-secret facility in Burbank to build the XP-80, the first U.S. production jet fighter for World War II. It was housed at first in circus tents next to a plastics factory that gave off such foul odors employees dubbed it the “Skunk Works” after the evil-smelling moonshine distillery in the then-popular comic strip “Lil’ Abner.”

Later, it became an autonomous unit of Lockheed formally named Advanced Development Projects. Its engineers secretly designed and built, among other advanced aircraft, the U-2 spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union and the F-117 Stealth fighters used to attack Baghdad in the Gulf War.

In the early 1990s, Lockheed moved most of its operations to Georgia but transferred the Skunk Works to Palmdale.

The union’s president, Dale Herron, was traveling and could not be reached for comment after the balloting. A spokeswoman for the guild said Herron and other union officials would not comment on the vote until Monday. A Skunk Works spokesmen said the company also had no comment.

John Morehead, one of the engineers who had pushed for decertification in a campaign conducted largely by e-mail, said he would have liked the vote to be “more of a clear-cut statement.” But he added: “It boils down to ‘the majority rules,’ so you’ve got to pick one way or the other. I don’t feel bad that everybody got a voice.”

At the time of a nine-week strike in 1980, the guild’s rolls included about 60% of about 2,500 engineers working at Lockheed plants in Southern California, said Herron, a 27-year Lockheed employee who has been president of the union since 1994.

He blamed the steep membership decline on the strike, which he said “left a bitter taste in some employees’ mouths.”

Morehead, a Skunk Works engineer since 1996, said professionals, such as engineers, don’t need unions to deal with management and that the guild was too quick to take an adversarial role.

“What we have been hearing from people who support this effort,” said Morehead before the vote, “is that they would prefer to work in a more professional environment without union tactics and union rhetoric.”

Morehead said the guild showed last summer how out of touch it was by questioning a company proposal to shift from straight 40-hour weeks to a “9/80” schedule, in which 80 hours are compressed into nine work days. The union leaders didn’t seem to realize, he said, that no more hours would be added and that workers would get an extra Friday off every two weeks.

Engineers voted by a two-thirds margin in September to put the 9/80 plan into effect.

Herron acknowledged that the 9/80 plan was clearly popular, but said the union was just doing its job, making sure, for instance, that the new plan would abide by contract terms covering matters such as sick time and overtime pay.

“We weren’t against it,” Herron said, “but, being leaders of the union, we had to ask certain questions.”